


Once Again, From Scratch

by lokineedstherapy



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-11
Updated: 2015-02-11
Packaged: 2018-03-11 21:21:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3333278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lokineedstherapy/pseuds/lokineedstherapy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James returns to Skyfall, two years after the old house was blown to pieces, in search of closure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once Again, From Scratch

It was even colder now than the last time he’d been here. Snow dusted the landscape like frosting, glistening in the weak winter sunlight, the cloudless sky only making the air colder. The usually marshy ground was frozen solid, pitted and uneven and unyielding. It was an accident waiting to happen. Where the old house had once stood there was now a blackened crater, a remarkably unnatural blemish on the white vista. Even the elements appeared to have shied away from it: it was completely untouched by the snow which had even managed to settle on the thin antlers of the one remaining stone stag which proudly protected Skyfall.

  
Bond leant against the bonnet of his car with his arms crossed over his chest as he looked out onto the familiar scenery like a disgruntled art collector viewing a painting for which he was outbid at auction. As much as he had always disliked the old house which had once stood in that spot, it had been his home, his childhood, a link to his past which had been otherwise erased by years of hiding in the shadows; everything else had been taken away piece by piece, been chipped away over the years until the man who was once James Bond all but disappeared. He’d managed to withstand the rest but now he felt dead. Dead as that crater.

  
The car door opened suddenly and Q tumbled out, wrapped up in so much wool that he was beginning to resemble a sheep that had wandered into a dye factory, and immediately slipped over on a patch of black ice. James watched with a smirk on his face as the man struggled to scrabble to his feet and maintain any sense of dignity at all.  
Disgruntled, cold, and aching from the long car journey, Q was beginning to wonder if coming all the way out here with Bond was worth the trouble: he hadn’t had phone signal for the last two hours and any sort of mobile internet had become quickly impractical and then impossible barely an hour after leaving London. “Are we going to go in?” He said. “Or are we going to stand here all day?” Trying to act like he hadn’t fallen, like he didn’t feel disconnected from the world, like he wasn’t wrapped up in several layers of winter wear while Bond seemed fine in a jacket, Q walked past the stag and started down the path towards the crater. It was overgrown and cracked and there was evidence of the firefight which had ravaged this valley two years ago everywhere: debris here, black marks from fire there, bullet shells scattered around.

  
Two years since he had met James. It felt like longer.

  
Q struggled and slipped down the road towards where the house once stood. Until the man became nothing more than an obscenely coloured blob in the distance, Bond didn’t move, couldn’t make himself move. He felt that he had no right to be here anymore: the boy who had once called this place home was long gone, and had the grand old place simply fallen to ruin he wouldn’t have taken any notice of it at all. The realisation that he wasn’t here for the house at all didn’t so much hit him as slowly become apparent the closer and closer Q got to the crater, and by the time the other man reached it James was walking a different route through the grounds: a tiny path, carved out of the moor centuries ago and all but forgotten since, which meandered across the land towards the chapel.

  
There was a tiny graveyard next to the building, with the graves of a few generations of Bonds before him scattered around the space. Most of them were overgrown, falling to rubble under the heavy hand of the Scottish weather and the persistent pull of the coarse plants which grew here, but there were two which someone had been maintaining on at least a semi-regular basis: his parents’ memorials. The ignominious stones utterly failed to reflect any aspect of either of them. Monique Delacroix-Bond had been a gentle, astute woman, for whom stone was too crude; Andrew Bond had been a cruel, hot-tempered man for whom it was too kind. The building itself was crumbling at the edges. Thick walls, small, coloured glass windows; the floor was paved with wide blocks of stone, worn away in grooves by the wooden pews which lined up patiently inside, like old men and women who spent their weeks waiting for Sunday. There was none of Skyfall’s grandeur here, none of its pretention; the mess from the house had been abandoned outside, M’s blood had been laboriously scrubbed from the flagstones here.

  
Inside and shielded from the wind, it wasn’t quite so bitterly cold in the chapel, and that was enough to make James think that he could safely remove his jacket without risking freezing to death. There was no reason to take off that layer of clothing – it certainly wasn’t warm here – but Bond felt it was the right thing to do. It was nothing but slightly passive self-flagellation, all of this, so of course it was the right thing to do.

  
It worried Q that Bond hadn’t followed him. This entire journey, the man had been extremely difficult to read: he was unusually quiet, made no jokes, barely smiled, and he wasn’t reacting to anything in the ways which Q had come to expect. It was as if Bond was an entirely different person to the man he had gotten to know intimately since the incident they were here to commemorate. Definitely a mistake, Q noted. They wouldn’t be coming here again if this was what happened every time, it would be hell on his agent’s mental health, and it wasn’t as if he was strictly stable anyway. He watched James walk over to the chapel and began to head in that direction himself; it was a struggle to move over the craggy, slippery earth, which meant that although Q had been closer to the chapel Bond had disappeared inside it a long while before he got there.

  
James barely turned his head when Q slammed the chapel door shut. He was sitting on the floor in front of the first pew, staring vaguely off into space. He had been hoping that he’d find some sort of closure here, some way to start to heal, but he hadn’t found anything and the effort of trying had left him feeling even emptier and more hollow than before. Silence hung between them for a few moments, heavy and full of things that would have to go unsaid, before Q walked down between the pews and sat himself down next to Bond. Q pulled off his glove and laced their fingers together, his own hand sweaty from the mitten and James’ so cold he could barely feel it. “What’s going on in your head, James?” He asked, his voice sounding very loud after so much quiet. It bounced off the walls and it seemed like the place was ringing for a second after everything had gone still and quiet again.

  
“Nothing new.” That was exactly the problem: he had thought that coming here again would change something, anything, but even with all of the memories these places brought not a single thing had really changed.

  
Q hummed vaguely, trying to wipe all signals of his worry out of his expression. Then, afraid that he would give himself away in speaking, he turned and kissed Bond’s shoulder, and then his temple, and grabbed the jacket from the pew behind them to lay over his agent’s torso like he was tucking a child into bed.

  
The feeling of safety which came with Q and all the little things the man did was profound. Bond offered a small, lopsided smile as his jacket was wrapped around him, and he let Q hold him and kiss him and fuss. This wasn’t new either, but here, in this chapel from his childhood, James saw it all in a different light. His job had taken away who he used to be but what was left of him, Q loved. And that was enough to let him start again, from scratch.


End file.
